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Now that I am back home and not in Sweden, I have been combing through some of the work that I did in my first few months at KTH. I took a lot of photographs of pretty much everything I could take photos of when I was in Sweden, and I got some interesting shots of a variety of things, including project work.

One of the first projects we did in groups was the Materials Testing project. It was a very simple project with a goal more along the lines of working in groups that really much else – each group was to pick three “materials” out of a bin of random stuff in the lighting lab and take pictures of it under three of the different light sources in the lab’s light box. The box was a shelf of chambers, each with a different light source in it – halogens, fluorescents, incandescents, oh my (et al):

As a group, we analyzed each material under the sources we chose – an opal (frosted) incandescent (around 3,000 Kelvin), a Philips Activiva fluorescent source (at around 17,000 Kelvin, I think), and high-pressure sodium lamp (around 2400 Kelvin). What our group wanted to do over other groups was to give the images we took representational names as opposed to descriptive modifiers with no artistic or intrinsic value.

I’ve listed the nine images below – I’ve also grouped them into material type, as it’s interesting to see the same material under three different sources in contrast.

First material: an ellipsoidal reflector
Light sources, in order: incandescent, HPS, Activiva
The image names we invented were based on the group’s collective emotional response to each material and light source.

Okay, maybe deathmatch is a little bit much, but Howard Brandston, one of the lighting industries superstars (with over 50 years and 2500+ projects) is certainly not a fan of high pressure sodium light. I just ran across a New Yorker article about Howard Brandston discussing some sodium vapors (and other stuff) on a walking tour in NYC. Howard calls HPS “the lamp of least choice.”